Following last Friday's Q3 outlook lowering by Intel, market punters such as Merrill Lynch cut estimates. Vivek Arya, an analyst with the firm, cut its Q3 and Q4 estimates for Intel, while remaining optimistic about upcoming processes in the company's pitched battle with ARM in the lightweight SoC segment. Arya believes that with upcoming technologies, Intel has a fighting chance against ARM heavyweights. Said Arya in his report:

Next-gen chip manufacturing has become a 3-horse race between Intel, TSMC and Samsung, with Intel holding a 1 to 4 year lead, in our view. As we saw in 1H12, foundries were unable to ramp 28nm capacity, leading to product delays. Rising costs/ complexity (tri-gate) could further widen this gap. We believe this could enable Intel to gain a foothold (vs. zero today) in mobile over the next 2 years, as smartphone/tablet vendors look to Intel as a second or even primary source […] We firmly believe in Intel’s ability to reliably produce the lowest cost and highest performance silicon can help it maintain a dominant position in servers/data centers (20% of sales, 10-15% CAGR), and transition from legacy PCs to next-gen smartphones, tablets, Ultrabooks and other converged devices in the next 1-2 years. Investors, meanwhile, benefit from a 3.6% div yield, $7.5bn in available buybacks (6% of mkt cap) and <10x PE.

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Arya appears to be particularly optimistic about Intel's next-generation "Haswell" micro-architecture, which will be unveiled at IDF, later this week. Haswell is a brand new micro-architecture built on the company's refined 22 nanometer silicon fabrication process:

Haswell will be the first processor to be designed from the ground up to fully optimize the power savings and performance benefits from the move to 3D or tri-gate transistors on the 22nm process node. Improved graphics performance. Haswell is expected to double the graphics performance vs. Ivy Bridge processors bringing its performance on par with the $50-$70 graphics cards.

Rather than try and just dominate the Chip market why dosn't intel take its head of of its backside and help....

I think intel will be fine...

Although if I could get a desktop board and drop in an arm cpu Id almost say good bye to X86.

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Most of those words mean things, but in that order they don't.

intel, like any company is in it to make money they never set out to "kill" other businesses, mips is still alive and well, DEC collapsed because of mismanagement and all the good bits from alpha were taken by intel and amd anyway. Pa-risc was to expensive for HP to maintain and intel's own risc experiment was just that.

Although if I could get a desktop board and drop in an arm cpu Id almost say good bye to X86.

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The ARM Cortex A15 architecture will only be approaching the low end desktop performance range, with a quad core, at its higher end clocks (2.0 - 2.5 Ghz). Still 32 bit though.
64 bit ARM (v8), is not yet available; probably another 2 years.

If Intel can produce something with low power consumption, then a Haswell based Atom could be a serious competitor for ARM.

Be careful. Intel certainly had a very modest first release into the mobile arena, but they have VERY deep pockets, and the ability (and capacity) to have a huge impact. The other chip makers better be ready for what Intel can do.